Debbie Goldman (PhD, 2021) Wins Dissertation Award

Goldman Dissertation Wins Labor and Employment Relations Association's 2022 Thomas A Kochan and Stephen R. Sleigh Best Dissertation Award

Debbie Goldman (PhD, 2021) has won the Labor  and Employment Relations Association's 2022 Thomas A Kochan and Stephen R. Sleigh Best Dissertation Award for her dissertation "Resistance in the Digital Workplace: Call Center Workers in Bell Telephone Companies, 1965-2005."

The award letter explains: “Dr. Goldman’s dissertation recounts the trajectory of worker resistance in the telecommunications industry undergoing profound changes in the second half of the 20th century. The author draws on management and labor archives, as well as interviews with Communications Workers of America organizers and five Bell Atlantic and AT&T managers. This is a critical story told from a unique insider’s perspective about women’s roles in the labor movement. As Dr. Goldman explains, female operators engaged in both “the fight for women’s power within the union and the struggle for greater union control over conditions at work” as the telecommunications industry used developing technologies to surveil and control labor and cut costs through outsourcing. Dr. Goldman’s work is a cautionary tale about the limits of collective action to stem the tide of neoliberalism and financialization. As she argues, “union power proved necessary but not sufficient to address the root causes of the insecure, unhealthy, and dehumanizing jobs in the call centers.” While the modern story of the telecommunications industry has grown more dire as technologies and deregulation have grown exponentially, analysis of worker resistance and the role of CWA offers important lessons for workers today across a range of industries similarly subjected to “abusive surveillance, work speed up, unreasonable sales quotas, and downgrading and deskilling of jobs.” This story is told uniquely by a historian and rank and file member who brings insider insight spanning nearly two decades of work with CWA."